Well, greetings people of the internet—Unkyjoe here. In this one I finally document the process of self-hosting Ghost CMS the way I wanted it: on a Proxmox VM running Ubuntu 24.04, behind my existing NGINX Proxy Manager, sharing a single public IP with the rest of my stuff. Ghost is hands-down the easiest blogging platform I’ve used—simple, clean, and it gets the hell out of my way—but self-hosting it had me banging my head against the wall for months because most guides assume you’re using Ghost’s bundled NGINX. I’m not doing that here. I walk through cloning an Ubuntu template in Proxmox, updating the box, installing MySQL, installing Node.js (pay attention to the version), and using the Ghost CLI to get it installed under /var/www. Then I cover the “gotchas” that will ruin your day if you miss them—like making Ghost listen on all interfaces (not just loopback), and setting up NGINX Proxy Manager correctly with the right port (2368), websockets, and the custom proxy headers Ghost needs to behave behind HTTPS. I also talk about SSL certs via DNS validation (Cloudflare), because my old port-80 method stopped working. End result: it survives a reboot, it’s backed up like any other VM, and I’m not paying somebody $12 a month for something I can run myself.